Many thanks for replying. I think its important to get this out quickly so it will benefit the most users. The "rarer" install methods I think we could add this feature too later, for now what would be the code needed to only insert this link into "frugal" installs?

WhoDo has indicated to me that if this feature would DEFINITELY not break any existing code, he would be adding it to the soon to be released puppy 4.2 . I think frugal installs are used by the great many new users, and we should just concentrate on getting that part going for this, and leave the other methods until later.

Thanks again for your help PizzasGood

I'm not at all sure what this feature might be good for, but it sounds like it might be a step toward making multisession Puppy do something I've wanted. At the risk of hijacking this thread, I'll explain.

It has to do with Archiving stuff on a multisession DVD, so that the stuff in Archives is not loaded into RAM when multisession Puppy boots but is still available by clicking on the Archives directory (which would then mount the DVD and show the Archives directory in ROX.) I've experimented with saving stuff on a multisession DVD in separate sessions, which multisession Puppy does not see when it boots. If stuff is saved in, for example, a directory named Archives each time a special session is saved, then, when Puppy mounts the multisession DVD, the Archives folder which appears in ROX contains all the files and subfolders which were saved in all the separate special Archives sessions. Somehow the OS assembles the separate sessions into one folder. Amazing, and potentially very useful.

So it seems like all that is needed is an Archives directory, into which I would put anything I want to archive, and which is then saved to the DVD as a special session. I'm not sure how implementing this might affect the existing Puppy filesystem and whatnot. Any thoughts?

(By the way, Pizza, I'd be happy to test your program in multisession Puppy if I can find the time, but I don't really understand what problem it's intended to solve.)Last edited by Flash on Sat 07 Mar 2009, 09:07; edited 1 time in total

Well, IMHO it's somewhat redundant, but I can certainly see why new users wouldn't know about or understand /mnt/home. They probably think it's quite strange to open the file manager, go "up", then into a weird location named "mnt", then to "home", just to get to their good old C:\ drive. This makes it simpler.

Ok, I understand why you're doing it now. It seems like a good idea to me.

Pizzasgood wrote:

Flash wrote:

So it seems like all that is needed is an Archives directory, into which I would put anything I want to archive, and which is then saved to the DVD as a special session. I'm not sure how implementing this might affect the existing Puppy filesystem and whatnot. Any thoughts?

Isn't that what already happens with the /archive directory already in Puppy? I don't use multisession, but I was under the impression that that was exactly what /archive was there for. According to /archive/README-archive.txt, anything placed there will be stored on the disk without being loaded into ram next time. And the CD can be viewed by simply clicking the CD icon on the desktop, now that we have those drive icons in Puppy...

Well, when you mount the multisession DVD all you see in ROX (besides the various Puppy files) are the various session folders (sorted by date). /archive is saved inside the session folder it's saved in, just like all the other folders that are saved in that session. If you don't know which session the thing you're looking for was saved in, you have to inspect /archive of each saved session until you find what you're looking for.

If the Archive folder were saved outside the sessions, and always with the same name, it would still be ignored by Puppy's boot program, so it would not be loaded into RAM. It would show up as one folder, named Archive, in ROX when the DVD is mounted, no matter how many instances of an Archive folder were saved to the DVD. All the different files and folders that were saved in the various Archives would show up inside one Archive folder in ROX even though they might have been saved at different times.

Ah, I see. With your method, what happens if you attempt to save a new version of a file over an old version with the same name? Does it rename it to let them coexist, or does it "cover up" the old one (obviously it can't literally delete it)? If the latter, is there a way to tell it to ignore the new copy so you can retrieve the old one?

I mainly ask because with this, you don't get to see the existing files when you drop in new ones, so you don't get the "do you want to overwrite?" question.

If it doesn't have some kind of built-in handling of those situations, maybe we could write a script to check in advance if there will be any overwrites, and then pop up a warning before shutting down so the user can go back and rename things first._________________Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. --Muad'Dib

It's been a while since I experimented with recording extra-Puppy sessions on a multisession DVD, but I'm pretty sure that only the latest version of a file is shown, at least in ROX. Obviously any earlier versions of the file are still on the disk, but I don't know how you could access them since the filesystem hides them behind the latest version. I have no idea where this arranging is done, in the OS or in the drive. It seems to me that it must be in the OS. Maybe you'd have to use the dd command. It could get messy.

As you suggest, it *should* be possible to mount the DVD and look in its Archives folder for duplicate filenames before recording a new session. If identical filenames are found on the disk, perhaps a number could be added to the filename to be recorded, so that 'filename_1, filename_2, filename_3' .... etc. would show in the Archive folder in ROX. It seems like that might be tricky to implement with a script, now that I think about it. Hmm, interesting problem.

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